The first time I heard the music of Xandra Metcalfe, aka Uboa, was when I was 14 years old. It was near the end of 2019, as we moved into a pandemic-ridden society that forced our world to be locked in our homes for a few months. Unsurprisingly, it was a time when my inquisitive teenage brain went wild, eventually discovering her album The Origin Of My Depression (2019). Six years later, this record still clings to my psyche and the memories I've associated it with, which include late-night emotional breakdowns and high-strung moments that plagued my day-to-day life while also attempting to keep up with the home-based learning that my school was assigning me at the time. That Metcalfe suffers from Functional Neurological Disorder while continuing to create art while releasing her previous full-length album in 2024 astounded and even encouraged me. After all, she is known for producing the most emotionally draining, make-your-flesh-crawl type of horrifying records last two decades.
While things are hopefully looking up for Xandra, it seems like she continues to further jostle the imaginary boundaries of what makes her work disturbing in the first place, having already released the Impossible Light and All the Dead Melt Down as Rain EP in the last couple of months. It’s also no surprise she would enlist the aid of Melbourne's grotesque heavyweights Whitehorse for The Dissolution Of Eternity. After all, there's no other band that plays sludge metal with the kind of plodding, mangled guitars and rhythms that conjure twisted, body-contorting horrors that could make David Cronenberg drool.
The Dissolution of Eternity is not technically a formal collaboration, being pieced together from the depths of Whitehorse’s pre-Death Weight (2021) sessions and whatever vestiges that hide in Uboa’s SD drive and Ableton files. As such, the album feels like a harrowing descent into an abandoned sanatorium, as two of Australia's gnarliest and most demonic aural conjurers are bouncing off each other with a burning, volatile chemistry akin to Billy Loomis and Stu Macher in the movie Scream (1996)—opens the record with two songs that impart a sense of slow, creeping horror that feels like silently hiding in a locked bathroom, only for Uboa's foreboding gloom of deathly synthesizers, noise, and hellish, piercing soundscapes to prance upon you like a classic '90s horror movie jump-scare. This isn't music for the faint of heart. Its sound is less about comfort and more about catharsis—a raw, visceral purging of dread. I urge you to listen and decide for yourself if you're willing to have your limits so vigorously tested.